They are of a type, you see, these girls. Ruined by Communism well before they come to the West. Without morals. It is a joke the Czechs telclass="underline" the Communists abolished prostitution by making every woman a whore. I remember girls just like them, from good families, speaking French. Fifty years ago they were crawling across the boards of the abandoned Fisch château near Alexandria while shells whistled everywhere in the dark and half the city was in flames. They were filthy and naked, luxuriating in the expensive furs Hrihorieff’s bandits had given them. Some were not more than fourteen or fifteen years old. Their little breasts hanging down, their brazen mouths open to receive us, they were utterly corrupted and it was obvious that they were relishing it. I felt nauseated and fled the scene, risking my life, and I still feel sick when I remember it. But are the girls to blame? Then, no. Today, in the free world, I say ‘Yes, they are.’ For here they have a choice. And they represent Slavic womanhood, for so long pure, feminine, maternal. But this is what happens when religion is denied.
My mother, although of Polish extraction, was attracted more to the Greek than the Roman in her religious preferences, though I never knew her to attend formal services. She observed all the Orthodox holidays. I do not remember ikons (though she doubtless possessed them). She always had a picture of my father (in his uniform) in an alcove, with candles burning. It was here that my mother prayed. She never criticised my father, but she was anxious to remind me of how he had gone astray. He had denied God. An atheist, he had been involved in the uprisings of 1905. During this period he had almost certainly been killed, though the circumstances were never entirely clear. My mother herself would become vague when the subject was raised. My own memory is a confused one. I recall a sense of terror, of hiding, I think, under some stairs. On the other hand the equation itself was clear enough: God had withdrawn his grace and his protection from my father as a direct punishment. Aside from the fact that my father had been an officer in a Cossack regiment and had thrown away his career, that his family had been well-to-do but had disowned him, I knew very little about him. Out of tact, our relatives never mentioned him. Only Uncle Semyon in Odessa ever made any reference to him and that was always to curse him as ‘A fool, but a fool with a brain. The worst kind.’ At any rate I have no memories of him, for he was rarely at home, even in the Tsaritsyn days, and my memories of Tsaritsyn itself are confined to a few narrow, dusty, nondescript alleys, for we moved in 1907 to Kiev again, where my mother had a sister. Here they both worked as seamstresses. This was a terrible descent for a woman like my mother, who possessed a refined sensibility, spoke several languages, and was conversant in all forms of literature and learning. Later she became the manageress of a steam-laundry and after her sister re-married we moved into the two-room flat near Mother’s job. This was in a part of town with many old trees, little copses, parks and some fields even, very close to the Babi ravine (the ‘Old Woman’ ravine) which, with its grass, rocks and stream, became my main playground.
Here I would defend Kipling’s Khyber Pass and, as Karl May’s ‘Old Shatterhand’, explore the Rocky Mountains. I would fight the Battle of Borodino. I would defend Byzantium against the Turks. On rarer occasions I would go to the Dnieper’s beaches and be Huckleberry Finn, Ahab, Captain Nemo. Even then Kiev had its share of revolutionary troubles. The agitation came mainly from the workers in the industrial suburbs beyond the Botanical Gardens: blocks of flats as featureless and smoky as any you can find today. The authorities had had to clamp down quite heavily, but all I knew of this was when my mother kept me inside or stopped me going to school. On the whole, however, I experienced little of the unpleasant side of life in Kiev. It was a wonderful city in which to grow up. Near us was a road which ran through the gorges. This area was known as the Switzerland of Kiev. Thus I had the best of both worlds - country and city - though we were not rich. Kiev, and the Ukraine in general, inspired art and intellectual activity of every kind. Half Russia’s greatest writers produced their best work there. All Russia’s best engineers came from there. Even the Jews excelled themselves. But they, of course, were never content.
Built on hills above the river; full of cathedrals and monasteries with glittering onion-domes, green copper, gold and lapis lazuli; full of great public buildings in the soft yellow brick for which Kiev was famous; of carved wooden houses, crowded street markets, statues, monuments, the large stores and theatres of the Kreshchatik, our main street, the University and various institutes, the Botanical Gardens, the Zoo, modern tramways; its squares crammed with electric signs, advertisement hoardings, kiosks, theatre advertisements; its thoroughfares crowded with motor-vehicles and horse-drawn carriages, carts, omnibuses; with trees, parks and green places everywhere, with the great commercial river full of steamers, yachts, barges and rafts (she was founded by the Scandinavian Rus to protect their most important trade-route), Kiev was no provincial city, but the capital of ancient Russia, and well aware of the fact. Once, centuries before, she had been a walled garrison city of grim stone and unpainted wood: ‘Mother City of all the Russias. The Rome of Russia.’ And the infidel had come and the infidel had been forced back, or converted, or accommodated, perhaps temporarily, and Kiev and what she protected had always survived. Now she was Yellow Kiev, warm and hospitable to all. In the summer sunlight it would seem she was made entirely of gold, for her brick glowed while her mosaics and posters, flowers and trees shone like jewels. In the winter, she was a white fairy-tale. In the spring the groaning and cracking of the Dnieper’s ice could be heard throughout the city. In the autumn Kiev’s mellow light and fading leaves blended so that she was a thousand shades of warm brown. By the early twentieth century she had reached the height of her beauty. Now, thanks to the Bolsheviks, she has become a lustreless shell, just another beehive with a few nondescript concrete monuments to pacify tourists. The Germans were blamed for destroying Kiev, but it is well-known that the Chekists blew most of it up in their 1941 retreat. Even the existing statues are copies. Kiev had a history older than most European cities: from her came the culture which civilised the Slavs. From her came our greatest epics. Who has not, for instance, marvelled at the film version of Ilya Mouremetz and the Heroes of Kiev, defenders of Christendom against the Tatar Horde, Bogatyr and the Beast? Ironically, what the Tatar failed to accomplish, the armies of the Bolsheviks and the Nazis succeeded in doing with relentless and unimaginative thoroughness.
We were poor, but there was wealth and beauty all around us. Our suburb, the Kurenvskaya, was rather run-down, though picturesquely countrified, with many wooden buildings and little gardens among the newer apartment houses (which were built around courtyards after the French model). If I wished I could walk down to the main city, or I could take the Number Ten tram past St Kyril’s church to Podol and, if I failed to be seduced by the sights and smells of the Jewish Quarter, could walk up St Andrew’s Hill to that great church, all blue-and-white mosaic on the outside and rich gold on the inside, to stare at the distant Dnieper, at Trukhanov Island where the yacht club was. On a misty autumn evening I would enjoy walking along the wide Kreshchatik boulevard, with its chestnut trees and bright shops and restaurants. But Kreshchatik was best at Christmas, when the lamps were lit and the snow was piled against walls and gutters to make magical pathways from door to door. I remember the smell of pine and ice, of pastries and coffee and that special smell, rather like newly-cut wood with a hint of fresh paint, of Christmas toys. Cabs and troikas rolled through the golden darkness; the breath of horses was whiter than the snow itself; warm, rattling trams radiated orange electric light. It is a ghost in my mind. It no longer exists. The Bolsheviks blew it to pieces as they retreated from the Nazis who, only a few months earlier, had helped them loot Poland.